Currently Reading | The Sellout

This year I want to read 50 books, or a book every week(ish). First on my Goodreads list with The Sellout by Paul Beatty. The book won various literary prizes, including the Man Booker Prize in 2016. The book itself was hilarious in places and meant to be tongue in check, yet I didn’t love it. The main character, was brought up by his father, led to partake in various psychological and social experiments to aid his fathers work on psychology. The book looks at various racial issues in modern America, yet given current political situations, I wasn’t sure whether to find some of the comments funny.

However, the below quote definitely summed up plenty of situations.

Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.

How many times can we each admit to seeing something we aren’t comfortable with, whether racism, sexism or someone being downright rude and done nothing about it?! It’s admittedly so much easier to just do nothing and remain in silence, fear of being judged, or acting out or aggravating a situation tends to win.

I did find the notion of a city being taken of the map an interesting one. If the city doesn’t exist on the map, how do you express where you are from? The idea of spray painting round the city edges, to therefore create the city boundary did make me smile.

I am definitely going to read other books that have won The Man Booker Prize to see if I enjoy them more.